I would, obviously, compress the vocals. I would compress the turntables and the sampler because a lot of the times, some of the samples I'm sent are at different levels, so I need them to remain pretty constant.

Any other effects on the FOH?

I'm using a [Eventide] 3000SE on Chester and Mike on the Micro Pitch Shift program, which is like plus or minus 9 [cents] and I think there is maybe a 10 ms delay on the left, and 25 on the right. It's very subtle, it gives it a little more thickness, spreads the vocal out just a little bit.

At most venues are you mixing in stereo?

Obviously some of the clubs probably aren't, but like Ozzfest, that was definitely stereo.

In stereo mixing situations, how do you pan the drums?

The first tom will be at like 3 o'clock, the second tom is at noon and the floor tom will be at like 9 o'clock. Overheads are generally 10 o'clock and 2 o'clock, the high hat maybe off a little bit, like 1:30 or 2 o'clock.

So the stereo image matches how the kit is set up from the audience perspective?

That's the way they're hearing it. I tend not to spread the overheads out too much because it just sounds weird to me when you hit the cymbal and it's way off in the left or right.

What sort of material is coming out of the sampler?

There's some percussive stuff, because the drummer runs an [Alesis] DM5, I think that's just a trigger and the sounds just come out of the sampler.

Any real interesting train wrecks to report?

At the Jones Beach show, the sampler went down, and I believe the click comes from the sampler. And when that happens, the click goes and the sequencer goes and everything kind of falls to shit.

Do you carry a FOH rack?

I haven't yet. Until this tour that we're about to start into, we've been doing pretty much support gigs. We did Ozzfest, we supported the Deftones in Europe and we did a quick headlining run of the States in clubs. So it was pretty much get the club to bring in whatever I need.

Since you aren't traveling with your own setup, what do you have to do during soundcheck? If you're supporting, do you sometimes not get enough time?

Ozzfest was great. We got an hour soundcheck the first day. We were using the Show Console [designed by Showco and Harrison], so everything was stored to disk. Comps and gates are on every strip…. [For] Festival gigs, I give the technicians my input lists and they'll show me where it's coming up, and we get anywhere from 20 minutes to 30 minutes to line check it during changeover, and then away we go. From working with the band I pretty much know where to start as far as gain and EQ and compression. Usually it's dialed in within the first song.

Is the first song of Linkin Park's show usually something that's easy to deal with from the FOH?

Yeah it's pretty straightforward. Again, there's a lot of information coming at me from turntables to sampler, to one guy singing to one guy rapping, but after being with them for 8 or nine months now, [I'm used to it].

Are the guitars mostly tuned down?

I think most of them are drop D. There might be a couple of tunes in C#, but they're all down.